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[bubee]

Hi all,

I searched for this topic, but didn't get a hit. Here is my challenge:

I am planning a multiligual site with multiple topics. To keep it simple, say I have a site called somegenericname.com. On somegenericname.com I want to have 3 key topics I am optimizing for, news, recipes, and sports. Say I want to target 3 natural languages for these topic key words.

I this case, any ideas how how to structure subdomain names and dirctories? For example:

sports.somegenericname.com/English/ for the English/Sports top page? or is english.somegenericname.com/sports/ better?

How about the default domain name, www.somegenericname.com? Should I choose the priority topic/language combination for that? Or some I dyanamically display sports/english on www.somegenericname.com by detecting the user's browser language settings?

Perhaps I get new domain names for each topic? like sports-somegenericname.com/english/ ? (however, i thought it would be better to get as much traffic to a single domain name as possible for page ranking purposes.

Any advice would be appreciated!

Thanks!

[torka]

sports.somegenericname.com/English/ for the English/Sports top page? or is english.somegenericname.com/sports/ better?

Better for what?

(however, i thought it would be better to get as much traffic to a single domain name as possible for page ranking purposes.

To my knowledge, traffic volume has no effect on rankings.

Your pages will each be ranked individually depending on how the engines judge that page. The fact that Page A simply shares a domain name with Page B, which ranks highly for a couple of search terms, will not help Page A in the rankings. Something more than simply existing on the same domain is necessary.

Now, if Page B links to Page A, it will pass along some of it's link popularity to Page A. And that can potentially help Page A rank more highly for its target search terms (which may or may not be the same as the terms targeted by Page B ).

But that would happen no matter whether Page B was on the same domain, a subdomain or a different domain entirely.

It's the linking, not the shared domain name, that works the "magic."

IMO, how you set up subdomains or subdirectories or whatever is more of a site administration question than an SEO question. Set it up however it makes it easier for you to maintain and grow the site going forward.

My

--Torka